The logic of war against terrorism: as we have learnt from Israel and the US Terrorists use civilians as their shelters, so we can kill civilians (by mistake, of course) to defeat terrorism! Bombing thousands of civilians by a ‘state’ is not terrorism mainly because the carnage is not intentional! Producing and using weapons of mass destruction in massive scales is not a crime, but aiming to produce them is! For every victim of terrorism in the West, it is justified to kill hundreds of civilians in the East as the unavoidable causalities of war against terrorism! Democracy is good if a puppet comes out of the ballot! Terror means any threat against civilians in the US and its allies! The more power you have, the less you are terrorist!

6.8.06 08:14 Permalink / 4 Comments / comment

Iran-US conflict: beyond the box of polemics Submitted by ahmad alehossein on Tue, 2006-04-25 02:06. Both sides of conflict, the US and the Iranian regime, have common concerns which can help us understand their allegedly unreasonable behaviours over something not really awesome (the ability to produce nuclear bomb). That common concern is the growth of independent strong opposition to both theocracy and the US hegemony. The opposition is hardly reflected in Western Media let alone the Iranian media. The opposition has become highly autonomous and strong since the collapse of governmental reformism by Khatami. A simple glance into the society, despite strong censorships, can show us the importance of the issue. Just about 50% of people, according to official data publicized by the regime, boycotted the last election. 15% voted for Rafsanjani a pragmatist corrupt clergy who is in favour of compromise with the US and 35% voted for Ahmadi-Nejad, as he was highly unknown with strong slogans against corruption. One could say this is similar to the US patterns of election, but we should remember that Iran under Mullah’s regime is supposed to be a mass society with at least 90 % turnout for elections. Besides, in comparison with the elections that led to the overwhelming victory of reformists during 1997-2000, this formally reported portion of boycotters is significant. To this fact, one can add huge number of reports about the growth of opposition among workers (who are experiencing job lost, low wages, and the lack of rights for having unions), students, weblogers, the youth, and revolts by ethnic minorities in Provinces like Kurdistan, Khuzestan, and Baluchistan just during the last year. The growth of opposition is very important for both sides of power, especially for the US, as the opposition can bring about an autonomous democratic alternative to the whole region; a non- or anti- American democracy without affiliation to any Leftist or Rightist ideology for the first time in the whole history of region. Iranians are not alienated from such a prospect. They are the first nation in the East who had a revolution for constitution exactly one century ago. With two other following revolutions against unjust dictatorship (one for the nationalization of Oil in 1951-2 and the other in 1979), they have a great record of demands for freedom. Iranians among other Muslim societies have a particular position in terms of their historical experiences. They have experienced both corrupt secular and corrupt religious governance. Moreover, their main reactions to both have bean highly active directed from within their culture. Iran has a long history of despotism but at the same time, it has a long great history of opposition. In the American side, the growing opposition to the invasion of Iraq, the economic and political crises in the US, and the failures in Iraq are real matters for the Bush administration.   Regarding the above domestic dilemmas for the both sides of conflict, one can easily understand why both need to exaggerate the importance of nuclear issue. They need to create a new crisis to overlook the current real crises. Can they tackle the crisis after investing too much of their energy and rhetoric? Or would they lose their control over the crises? This depends how global civil society, peace movement, Iranian and American people will react.

25.4.06 07:22 Permalink / 3 Comments / comment

Should we trust Iran? I think most of the arguements around the issue of Iran's nuke case are trapped into a false controversy between the Western powers and ffice:smarttags" />Iranian regime. If United States has used nuclear bombs and Israel has stocked them unaccountably, this won't justify permiting Iran to approach to this potential. If we look at the issue from an independent green, humanist and peaceful point of view, we would conclude that Iran must be stopped as its political system is more undemocratic and even antidemocratic than the current Western political systems and is based on an islamo-fascist ideology. At the same time world society must put pressure on the US, Israel, Russia and North Korea to abandon their nuclear weaponry. Of course, Iran's president has claimed, that its projects are peaceful", but who can trust someone who believes is surronded by a "divine eura" and is the delegate of God on earth? As a Muslim who believes in God I personally, do not.

11.1.06 23:16 Permalink / 5 Comments / comment

Losing to Islamic Populism: The Self-made Failure of Governmental Reformism in Iran Losing to Islamic Populism: The Self-made Failure of Governmental Reformism in Iran Ahmad Alehosseinfficeffice" />   "Reformism from above is dead", "reformism has reached an impasse"; these are claims vociferously declared by iranian intellectual reformists like Said Hajarian, the so-called ideologue of the Iranian reformism, just about two years before the election. "A president is not more than a supplementer for the system" is an assertion passively stated by Khatami, and popularized by the reformist media, just less than one year before the election. Despite these acknowledgements revealed by reformists when they were questioned by critics about their malfunctions, during the recent election they sharply changed their voices and started disallowing their inabilities. While criticizing the interventions of the supreme leader in the executive and legislative matters, Moin, the progressive reformists, and his supporters paradoxically accepted the interference of the leader in favor of himself, when leader wanted the Guardian Council to include Moin into the list of candidates. These sort of very paradoxical behaviours, regardless of many sophisticated justifications behind them, worked against the reformists’ authenticity in the eyes of many of their potential supporters, if any plausibility had been left after 8 years ignoring the most subsistent demands (whether material or non-material) and values of multitudes of lower middle class, marginalized and disadvantaged people. In terms of resources for campaigning in 2005 election, reformists were definitely more powerful than in the 1997 election in which Khatami won his conservative competitor without having any newspaper, the TV's support and even supports from the moderate opposition groups from within like Nehzate Azadi. Khatami was experiencing a weaker situation on that time than his prospective successor Moin this year. However many people, whether from middle class or working class, voted for him since they in order to snub his alternative, a conservative clergy, Nateghe-Noori, who didn't initiate neither serious comments on, let alone reformist programs for, a fairer resource redistribution nor democratic changes. In this year election, the situation of reformists was comparable with the situation of Nateghe-Noori in 1997 in some essential respects. They failed to convince people of how to manage getting out of the impasse, they avoided criticizing or even reflecting upon their failures, and mistakes; from the beginning, as they themselves shamelessly depicted, people had been considered just ‘levers for pressure from below to run negotiations on the top’ (a very instrumentalist concept of democracy). They failed to render any clear program about how to tackle the structural obstacles Khatami's government used to mention as excuses for his failures, in order to convince pro-reform but disappointed students and intellectuals. Even they failed to address the material and economic needs of people, the very important issue of corruption and social discriminations in their mottos; they used to postpone these to time when democracy is completely realized. They expected millions of unprivileged people to forgo their very basic and immediate needs mainly for the sake of continuing a very long-term, exhausting course of realizing luxurious-like needs of middle class such as freedom of speech for moderate reformist journalist who had never raised the very essential demands of them. Even many of those who dedicated their votes to the reformists this year aimed to avoid the very creepy hardliner's victory. ‘Fighting with fatal bureaucratic corruption and inequality in the redistribution of resources’, ‘containing the grave economic inflammation’, and ‘impeding discriminations’ were just a set of very simple but effective slogans that Ahmadi-Nejad a man less recognized as a serious conservative by many disadvantaged and traditional families employed to win the election by attracting just 36 percent of the whole eligible voters against those who's slogans and programs were not addressing the needs of or convincing more than 20 percent. Ahmadi-Nejad's voting machine should not have reasonably been able to make him a winner in the second round if any of other candidates were able to convince the gray voters to support in the first round. Based on the official reports, 45 percent did not vote in the second round. The active participation of many of this part of population which included many students and intellectuals could be very crucial for the reformists’ victory. They cannot be simply described under political apathy.  Iranian reformism from above assured its death when got married with ‘structural adjustment programs’, ‘privatization’, and the World Bank advises that had been proved to be ineffective in many third world countries, and even in Iran during Rafsanjani’s term, due to the increasing social inequalities and even democratic accountability of political and economic institutions. Rather it helped the emergence of a young network of militarist-merchant groups who enjoyed tremendous rise of financial allocations in the reformist budgets. Finally, this network challenged its old founder, Rafsanjani, by involving the issues of inequality and poverty in their populist slogans. Today, reformists have no chance to reconstruct their potency through representative mechanisms, since the Iranian society is getting into a historical stage where the gap between civil societal forces and the state is getting widened and hopes for reforming the system regarding the structural-constitutional limits are being waned; the limits based on which even the issue of referendum looks as an unfeasible strategy. Developing underground single issue movements, establishing networks of resistance, organizing pockets of civil disobedience which are deeply linked with the immediate concerns and indigenous egalitarian-autonomous values - inherited from the very long history of Iranian resistance against the oriental despotism - are the initiatives one may expect as the bases of upcoming stories from the inside in the background of inter-state clashes with the West. photo from: http://www.payvand.com/news/04/feb/iran-election1.jpg

8.7.05 02:15 Permalink / 2 Comments / comment